Biggest damper: The California Supreme Court puts the brakes on gay marriages March 11 in San Francisco, where 4,000 couples have wed.

Biggest mystery: Just whom the Albemarle police are considering charging a year after the shooting of former deputy Stephen R. Shiflett. Frank Brown and Latrone M. Jones, who were detained by police after Shiflett claimed a thin black man in a baseball cap shot him, are suing the county, and have demanded documents in the investigation, Liesel Nowak reports in the Daily Progress.

Most notorious case: Albemarle County Commonwealth's Attorney James Camblos has been appointed special prosecutor in the 1982 rape and murder of Rebecca Lynn Williams, the case for which Earl Washington Jr. was wrongly convicted and nearly executed. DNA evidence points to Kenneth M. Tinsley, whom Camblos represented as a defense attorney almost 20 years ago. Critics are calling for Camblos to step down as special prosecutor, according to the Washington Post. Camblos says he does not believe there's a conflict.

Worst library tale: William Harvey Wright, 50, is arrested for fondling a 12-year-old girl at the Gordon Avenue Library, according to a Kate Andrews story in the Progress.

Best visual aid: Opponents to lowering Albemarle County's tax rate from 76 cents per $100 to 74 cents show up at a March 10 budget hearing bearing Tootsie Rolls to symbolize the 15 cents-a-day such a cut would represent to property owners while taking $2 million out of the 2005 school budgets.

Diciest fate for 20 Albemarle County high school seniors: They're in danger of not graduating because they haven't passed their SOLs, according to School Board member Brian Wheeler's March 11 meeting report. The at-risk students represent 2.2 percent of the county's 900 seniors, and are receiving individual help.

Safest campaign issue: Dems David Brown, Kendra Hamilton, and Kevin Lynch call a press conference to announce their support of moving City Council elections from May to November.

Best way to party down: With cards that measure blood alcohol level, which UVA's Office of Health Promotion will be passing out to students in hopes of keeping them from passing out.

Biggest convoy to visit Montpelier: Lynne Cheney's. The wife of VP Dick Cheney drops in on James Madison's former digs March 11 to teach a history lesson to elementary school students. [See Photophile, page 32.]

Worst black market: The UCLA medical school is under investigation amid charges that 800 bodies donated for medical research were hacked up and sold, according to the Post. The director of UCLA's cadaver program, Harry Reid, 54, is arrested for grand theft.

Worst loss of a poetic monologist: The body of Spaulding Grey, 62, author of Swimming to Cambodia and more than a dozen other performance confessionals, is pulled from the East River in New York March 7, two months after he took the Staten Island Ferry and disappeared.

Fattest nation: Obesity is weighing in as the leading preventable killer after tobacco. "We're just too darn fat," says Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.

Worse than profanity, violence or sex: A study shows that 80 percent of PG-13 movies show tobacco use, and critics want such movies slapped with an R rating. No word on the percentage of obese actors in those films.